Tuesday, November 20, 2012

The history geek has fun with dates...

Joe Biden, currently and just re-elected Vice-President of the United States and Norman Greenbaum, who was a one-hit-wonder with the song "Spirit in the Sky", were born on the same day, November 20, 1942.

This has nothing to do with anything.

Well, except that it has to do with the fact that I'm fascinated with dates and the things that happened on them. When I see a correlation like this, I feel compelled to mention it. I'm a little OCD that way sometimes.

I think I developed this fascination after I discovered one day that the first moon landing and Edward Kennedy's auto accident that led to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne happened on the same weekend, with the accident at Chappaquiddick occurring on July 18, 1969 while the first moon landing took place on July 20 of the same year.

Those two events have nothing to do with each other, of course, unless you take into consideration that it was Kennedy's brother, John F. Kennedy, who put the US on the course for the moon landing with his speech on May 25, 1961, in which he called for "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth" by the end of the 1960s. But with the way that the moon landing will reverberate throughout history, and the way that Edward Kennedy's misadventure reverberated through American politics and the rest of his life, it's just interesting to me that those two notable events occurred to close together.

Probably just the history geek in me.

I suppose there are some conspiracy theorists who could spin some sort of huge significance about Chappaquiddick and the Moon landing being on the same weekend. There are some, I suspect, who would even find something sinister about Biden and Greenbaum sharing the same birthdate.

For me, the fun of it is just in seeing the coincidences, pointing at them, and saying, "Hmmm. That's interesting."

Just proves that I'm easily amused.

And, for your amusement, and in case you aren't familiar with "Spirit in the Sky", here it is, in a promotional video apparently made at the time the song came out in 1969.